Mr Hywood said Fairfax would continue to review its assets for potential sales, with Sydney's 2UE, Melbourne's 3AW, Brisbane's 4BC and Perth's 6PR radio stations first in line.

"There's been a lot of interest in the radio stations and we are testing the market on that," Mr Hywood told ABC on Sunday.

"We are testing the market to see if someone comes up with a price for either all of the radio stations or a portion of the radio stations which is attractive to us."

The company announced a formal process for the sale of its regional and metropolitan radio stations in May.

Macquarie Radio Network Ltd has emerged as a potential bidder, saying last month it had requested details from Fairfax.

However, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspaper and online mastheads were not up for sale, Mr Hywood said.

"These mastheads encompass a newspaper, an online site and a very successful Ipad launch," he said.

"Now we've got in excess of a hundred thousand downloads of that Ipad, and as I say, it's an integrated model that we've created and one that we think will most effectively get revenue out of the advertising market."

While a renewed focus on journalism was on the cards, Fairfax was not planning to lock its content behind a paywall - as rival News Ltd outlined for its masthead The Australian earlier this month.

"We will have payment perhaps behind some paywalls for very special material, but we want to make sure that people have access to our brands," Mr Hywood said.

"Because if your business is creating audiences, you don't reduce your audiences by taking too much money upfront."

Media giant News Corporation said earlier this month it would start charging for digital access to its flagship publication The Australian from October, although some content would remain free.

Fairfax was reviewing whether to broaden access to the Australian Financial Review website, which requires a subscription to view articles.

Mr Hywood, who was appointed chief executive in February, also defended Fairfax's decision to outsource its sub-editing business, saying the "re-allocation of resources" would allow the company to "re-invest in the reporting, and writing and design of the papers".

"What we do with our business now across print and online and tablets is that we use our content - our journalism - to create audiences," Mr Hywood said.

"Now if you look at the old business, the old business didn't really need the journalism.

"It created a market around jobs, homes, cars, in print, and the company drew further audience into that through the journalism, but it wasn't completely dependent upon it."

Fairfax cut 82 jobs in May after contracting the sub-editing work on its major metro newspapers to Pagemasters, a division of AAP.

Fairfax and News Ltd are major AAP stakeholders.

Pagemasters has been sub-editing the titles' features sections since 2008 and will now work on the news, business and sports content.